Day One continued (Section 5)

Barbara: Okay, everyone is here and I have the go-ahead for the sound. What I'm going to do now is simply turn you over to Aaron. I'm curious. How many of you have never heard channeling before? It's new for many of you. Okay. I'm not really going to introduce Aaron. I'm going to let him introduce himself.

Aaron: My greetings and love to you all. I am Aaron. To some of you it may simply seem that Barbara is sitting here with her eyes closed, with some delusion that she hears a voice. So you wonder, am I real? My dear ones, I assure you that my own perception of myself is that I am real, but I have no need at all to convince you of that. You're hearing. Is that correct? There are words, words that frame thoughts. They come from somewhere. They are either helpful to you or they are not helpful to you. If they are helpful, take them into yourself and make them your own. If they are not helpful, discard them. It doesn't matter where they come from.

Barbara has been talking about the process of meditation and given you some brief times of practice. I want to take this practice and tie it in a bit deeper to my own spirit perspective. Sometimes it's easier to do hard work when you have a clearer understanding of why you are doing it. Why should one sit quietly and label what arises? To what end?

Let me begin with some basics. I am a spirit. You are spirit. You have a body. I do not have a body. There the difference between us ends. I have a mental body, as you do. I do not have an emotional body in the same way that you do, so it's not only the physical body that differs, but also that I have no attachments and aversions. I do experience joy and sorrow, but I'm not caught up in them as emotions.

A brief aside here. Jocelyn, I am attempting to pace my speech and speak slowly for those less practiced in English. Might I request of you, if it would be helpful for me to go still slower, one firm longer touch on Barbara's knee would help me to know that. If faster, two taps. So, if at any time you need me to speed up or slow down, please let me know.

You have physical and emotional bodies. You do not want to be free of these. They are a gift, sometimes a challenging gift, but still a gift. They offer you the opportunity to practice being in your mental body, experiencing emotions, and to use these sensations and emotions as catalysts for the learning of kindness and compassion, and truly of unconditional love.

There is a story told of a spiritual teacher named Gurdjieff in France. Living in his community were many very loving people, but there was one man in the community who was very rude. He didn't do his share of the work. People found themselves very annoyed with his presence. He knew that he wasn't liked and eventually, he got up and left. Gurdjieff went after him and asked him to please come back. He said no. Gurdjieff said, 'I will pay you to come back.' So, the man agreed. The people in the community were aghast. 'How could you ask him to come back?' Gurdjieff replied, 'He is the yeast for the bread. Without him, how are you going to learn compassion?'

Your physical and emotional bodies and the circumstance of your lives provide just such a yeast. You are not incarnate simply for convenience or comfort. You are not incarnate to build bridges, to conquer space, or develop new technologies. These are simply things that you learn along the way. You are incarnate to learn how to love, to learn how to bring light where there has been darkness, love where there has been fear and hatred. Ultimately, you are here to learn unconditional love.

When I say you are here to learn it, a better word might be to 'remember' it. There is nothing that you do not already know. Barbara has a book here from which I believe she intended to read, the writings of a twelfth century zen master. I may not quote him perfectly, but the idea he offers is, 'Although you are inherently spirited and splendid, still you must go ahead and enact it in the world.' In Buddhism they often talk about the idea that you are already enlightened, but that enlightened awareness is obscured by all the confusion, so you do not realize the enlightened state.

Another way of saying the same thing is to say that there is the essence of the divine within you. Yet, that does not deny the shadow that also occurs within you. I would ask for a sheet of paper. (Paper is provided.) Here is a perfect, unblemished, white sheet of paper. We could use this as metaphor for the essential perfection of each of you, not a perfection that you have to get, but an innate perfection.

(Barbara wrinkles the paper into a ball and then opens it out.)

Here we have a wrinkled sheet of paper. It's easy to see the wrinkles. Can you see that the perfect sheet of paper still exists? It's right there. The wrinkles are there. We do not deny the wrinkles, but why deny the perfection? Both are there. In your incarnate experience you get lost in the wrinkles. You think you have to smooth them out. You attack the wrinkles. You erroneously believe that you must get rid of all the wrinkles in order to manifest the perfect white sheet of paper.

You cannot ignore the wrinkles. You are responsible for the negative emotions that arise within you, and must attend to them. But that's not the whole of who you are. You are inherently perfect, are the perfect, unblemished sheet.

At a workshop some years ago, we asked people to make a list, two lists actually. One, we asked them to list all of the qualities they judged as 'good' about themselves. And in the other list, we asked them to list all of the qualities they judged as 'bad' about themselves. Think about this for a moment. (Pause)

We found several interesting things. First, the bad lists were much longer than the good lists. Second, there was a lot of crossing out on the good lists. People would say, for example, 'I am patient.' And then they would think, 'No, sometimes I am impatient,' and then they would write, 'I am impatient.' They felt that they might not honestly say, 'I am patient.' They thought, 'Ninety percent of the time, I am patient. Only ten percent of the time am I impatient. But if I am impatient ten percent of the time, I am impatient. Cross out patient.' The thinking was, 'It's got to be one hundred percent or I can't claim that quality.'

What human can be patient, generous, fearless, compassionate, one hundred percent of the time? Why do you ask this of yourselves? And so you condition yourselves to attack the negative, attack the wrinkles. And you pay so little attention to the beauty in yourselves. The way to practice a quality such as patience and nurture it is not to attack impatience every time it arises, but to notice patience, to notice how it feels to be patient, how spacious and in that way to nurture that quality.

You understand this in the raising of your children. If a child is noisy, you might say, 'Shhh! Quiet!' But you understand not to tell your child, 'Look how bad you are. You're always noisy. Why can't you be good?' Instead, when the child is quiet, you come and tell it. 'I appreciate how quiet you're being. You really have the ability to be quiet.' And in this way, you nurture that skill in the child. But in yourselves, most of you simply attack the self.

In meditation we observe the presence of both, the wrinkles and the everperfect. As you start to see these wrinkles as mere waves rolling across the surface of the ocean, you become more spacious in your relationship to them. When you cease to need to attack yourself, then you can offer that same spaciousness and kindness to others. This gives them happiness and helps them also learn not to attack themselves. Instead of identifying with the waves, meditation allows you to sink down to a place from which the waves may come and go. Yes, if the waves are very fierce, if there is tremendous rage in one moment, for example, you must be responsible for it. You must, in metaphor, see that a wave does not topple a boat and drown people, but the wave itself is just a wave.

Who are you when you are not caught up in your own physical, mental, and emotional bodies? Each of you has had the experience of the self, the purest self, at this time. It is a way of being that we could call pure awareness. It is a place where subject and object fall away. There is no one in this room who has not experienced that spaciousness. Perhaps you have experienced it while watching a sunset. No sense of self, just sunset happening. Or listening to a symphony. No separate self here. The music is simply alive and a part of you. You generally do not pay close attention to these moments. They come and they're gone. This is the space to which meditation opens you, this space of your deepest being, non-dual with everything.

We come here to the concepts of ultimate and relative reality. When I say non-dual, I refer to that core of being, that everperfect sheet of paper, pure awareness mind, which is the very center of your being and where you are not separate. Yet, in relative reality, of course there is the experience of separation. Some spiritual seekers would like to hide in ultimate reality and deny the relative being. Some of these high meditation states are very blissful. What happens when you come out of that state to somebody angrily knocking at your door, or to a phone call that your child has fallen off her bike, injured herself? You were in that blissful state and suddenly here's fear, here's anger.

From the ultimate experience you understand, 'There is nothing out there that can hurt me, because there is nothing separate from me,' and yet, right here there is pain. You cannot develop compassion in that ultimate state. Compassion comes from return to the relative without getting lost in the relative, without getting lost in your fear, or anger, or sense of need.

Meditation gives you access into the ultimate aspect of yourself. It helps you stably to rest in this perfect white sheet of paper and to attend to the wrinkles at the same time. There is no getting lost in either one.

As you attend the wrinkles with a deeper awareness of the true nature of your being, there is a natural spaciousness. You begin to see that everything in your experience is in some way an expression of the divine. I'm going to talk more about this idea, in considerable depth, this afternoon. I don't want to take it too far now. I don't want to talk so long that you cannot absorb the ideas I offer. I believe the plan is to stop now for a break for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then you will return and I will be glad to answer your questions, as will Barbara. We will close with a period of meditation before lunch. I thank you for your attention. That is all.

Barbara: This is Barbara speaking. I am laughing at Aaron because it seems like a game to him to get it precisely on that side of the tape, trying, but without any real attachment to it. It is just a game, but he was saying in the background as I was changing the tape, 'Oh, I missed it. I had another minute to say.'

(Break)